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Topic: survey

In 2013, our Stack Overflow community grew from 21.5 million to 26.9 million monthly visitors from 242 countries around the world. We’re doing a lot to keep growing with the community — we now have localized versions of Careers 2.0 for French and German audiences, we’re developing iOS and Android mobile apps for our entire network, and our first ever localized version of Stack Overflow with the Portuguese site currently in beta. As a way for us to make sure we’re doing the most for our users and community on Stack Overflow, we conduct a survey every year to see what you’re up to, how you’re using our site and what else is on your mind. This year, we analyzed a survey sample of 7,500 responses from 96 countries. As a thank you for the time you spent filling it out, we donated an additional $12,000 to our Stack Exchange Charities.

Observations

This is the second year we’re calling out mobile, and yes mobile is still growing.

While only 7.9% of you classified your occupation as a Mobile Application Developer, the majority of respondents (51.5%!) said that their company has a native mobile app. This is an increase from 2012 when 48.2% of respondents had a mobile app.

Android continues to climb while iPhone declines

Not only is the Android Phone the most popular mobile device with 63.8% of respondents saying they have one, the most popular native mobile platform supported is an Android Phone app with 39.5%. The iPhone lost more traction with developers this year with 30.7% of respondents saying they own an iPhone compared to 35.2% in 2012.

Working Remotely

As our Stack Exchange team is growing and we have more employees working remote, we added a number of questions about remote work. While only 10.6% of respondents said they are full-time remote, 63.9% of total respondents say they work remotely at least occasionally.

As a small token of our appreciation, we’ll be donating $1 for each completed survey to your choice of one of this year’s Stack Exchange Gives Back charities (on top of what we’re already donating on behalf of each site).

As always, we’ll be posting the results here on the blog once the survey is completed.

In December, we launched our 3rd annual Stack Overflow Annual User Survey to learn more about our site demographics and user trends throughout 2012. Compared to last year, we received an even larger sample size this year with almost 10,000 respondents!

Here are a few larger trends we’ve observed over the past three years:

You like us…you really like us!

Since 2009, site traffic to Stack Overflow has grown by a whopping 261.7%! As if this weren’t enough, we’re also now the 86th largest global site, according to Alexa. Our crazy goal of breaking into the top 50 is looking less crazy!

Mobile is on the move.

No real surprise here, but of the mobile family, the number of users who own Android devices increased 29.2% from 2010 to 2012—a bigger increase than owners of iPhones and iPads combined. Despite the rising mobile trend, we were surprised to learn that only 7.7% of you are employed as mobile apps developers and 51.8% of companies still don’t have a mobile app.

You’re getting happier at work.

Since 2010, we’ve seen a 2.2% uptick in workplace satisfaction, so 70% of you are happy in your current jobs. We’re not going to point fingers or anything, but we hope there may be some causation for those of you who found your current job from among the 10,000+ roles that were posted on Careers 2.0 last year.

Since we now have three years’ worth of data, we wanted to put together something a little special for this year’s overview, so check out the infographic below that our designer created to highlight some of our key findings.

It’s that most wonderful time of the year again — time for the Stack Overflow Annual Survey! So, put down that third glass of eggnog and fire up a new tab. It only takes a few minutes – and there are stickers!

As the name suggests, we’ve been doing this for a few years now (here are the 2010 results and the 2011 results for your perusal) and we always learn a lot from them. This data is used to support the advertising we sell on Stack Overflow and Server Fault. Advertising helps keep the lights on (and servers humming) around here, so if you use either (or both!) sites, we urge you to participate.

For those of you who’ve been around this block with us before, the survey should look fairly familiar. There’s no longer two jQuery options, though you can still jQuery while you jQuery if you need to. There are some questions that are a bit different, so please read each item carefully before you respond.

Just like previous years, we’re putting ads like the one above around the site to solicit particpation, and this blog post will help us reach our goal of roughly 3,500 responses. We’ll share the results of the survey with you all in a blog post early next year, and you’ll have the option of signing up to receive a copy of the results emailed to you directly at the end of the survey. So, please take a few moments to fill out the survey and then you can get right back to your holiday festivities.

Let’s start off with some basic demographics: the majority (50.3%) of users are between ages 25-34 and very experienced (64.3% of users have 6+ years of programming experience). So, where do all of these developers work? The percentage of developers working at a start-up remained strong with 30.7% of respondents. We then took a look at salary by company size, and, not surprisingly, users who work at larger companies tend to make more money.

Knowledge

The top 5 languages users reported knowing were: SQL, JavaScript, CSS, C#, Java. Coincidentally, the most common projects were “Web Platform” at 37.1%, followed by “Enterprise” at 24.4%. We dug a little deeper to see if language knowledge impacted salary, and it certainly does. There is a strong correlation between number of languages known and a higher salary.

Mobile

On the mobile front, smart phone usage showed a dramatic increase. In particular, Android usage actually surpassed iPhone usage with 48.0% of respondents saying they own an Android phone as compared to 34.1% who own an iPhone. Last year, the iPhone was the most popular device (34.3%) and Android trailed in second place (30.4%). RIM’s Blackberry continued to fall out of favor with only 6% of respondents owning one.

Reputation

Last year, many of you asked to segment the data by reputation, so here goes. First we segmented all of the respondents into three reputation groups and then we cross tabulated the results to see if there were any differences in these groups. You can draw your own conclusions from the table below, but higher rep users tend to be older and more likely to be happy in their jobs than those with little or no rep (however we can’t quite go so far as to say that the WAY to be happier in your job is to spend more time earning rep on Stack Overflow).